But that doesn’t mean that all fun things are easy. Although vacationing with my extended family once a year may in and of itself be a fun experience, planning it is not easy, so I shouldn’t discount the time it takes.
These are all critical points to think about as you analyze whether you have too many goals on your plate.
Once you feel you have the right goals for your year ahead, it’s time to dig deep into your goals and work out how to really accomplish them. One common goal on many people’s lists is reading. Many of us want to read more, whether to become more informed on a given topic, or as a way to enjoy ourselves on a more regular basis.
But, as we’ve discussed, “read more” is not a very specific goal to go after. Putting a number on that goal is a great way to prioritize reading in a way you can really go after. Twelve is a good, round number, and a number on many lists of annual goals. Let’s look at what a strategy would be like to ensure that you read twelve books this year.
BREAK DOWN THE GOAL
You don’t hit a goal by doing it all at once, but by breaking it down. To read twelve books a year, you need to read one book a month, or one quarter of a book per week. If you stick to this average, you’ve got your annual goal covered. Some months you may not reach this, but some months (like when you go on vacation for a week and read a lot), you will exceed this.
FIGURE OUT HOW LONG IT WILL TAKE
Approximating how long a goal will take you to accomplish is key. In the case of reading, try timing yourself as you read to see how many minutes it takes for you to read one page. If we assume an average book has 250 pages, then you’ll know how many hours (roughly!) it will take you to read an average book.
Let’s say you find that it takes you about twelve hours to read one book. This means you need to read about three hours a week to hit your annual goal of reading twelve books. When you know these numbers, you can then face up to them with strategies to get that reading done.
The same works for any goal you set for yourself, whether it’s running a marathon or increasing your giving by 10 percent or planning a vacation with family. Breaking down the goal into actionable items and determining how long it will take to accomplish that goal is essential. Sometimes this will be significantly easier than at other times. When faced with a goal like “self-publish a book,” a thousand small tasks have to take place to make that happen. At this stage you don’t need to have all those action items written down (or even know what they are yet!) but just plan as much as you can for the broad strokes of what needs to happen and when. Then you can move forward. At each stage of the larger process, you’ll then again break down that part of the goal into smaller pieces. Once you know the steps you need to accomplish to reach your goal and you understand the time involved, you need to start employing strategies to reach your goal.
In the case of reading, for example, here are a few tactics you could use to read three hours each week:
READ TWO BOOKS AT ONCE
For some people, reading multiple books at once works wonders. By doing so, this means you never get bored of one book, and can always turn to whatever is most appealing in a given situation. In my own life, I know that if I have five minutes waiting in line, it’s easier for me to read a memoir or novel than get through another page in a health or business book, for example. If I’m reading in bed late at night, I prefer dense nonfiction to help me fall asleep. Choosing different types of books on different occasions means that you’ll be more likely to be “in the mood” for one of the books on your list.
AUDIOBOOKS CAN BE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF YOUR ARSENAL
I don’t read every book with my own eyes, and neither should you. Using audiobooks is a great way to increase the time you can spend reading. I know someone who buys the print and audiobook version of a book so that she can switch back and forth between audiobook and print, depending on if she’s in the car or at home. In my life, I have an audiobook going when I exercise, commute, get ready in the morning, do chores, or am doing anything else wherein an audiobook works as positive background noise.
PLAN WHAT YOU WILL READ
Some people swear by planning out what books they want to read each month or year. Crystal Paine, power blogger at MoneySavingMom.com, gives her readers lists of the books she wants to tackle in a given month. I find that I don’t like being that precise, but I do have a few shelves of books just dedicated to books I want to get to sometime soon. I also have a list of books I want to read next in my email for those books I’ll be listening to in audiobook or reading on Kindle. This means that any time I am ready to start a new book, I can easily see what books I’ve been itching to read and decide what feels right for the day or week ahead. This helps immensely to keep me motivated and excited.
Just as personal trainers say that setting out your running clothes the evening before will make you more likely to go on your morning run, choosing the books you plan to read ahead of time can help motivate you.
ALWAYS BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR NEW BOOKS
The desire to read is the biggest thing that will get you to actually do it, and that desire is built on there being a book that you want to inhale. So it’s your job to make sure you’re surrounding yourself with really good books, and not just mediocre ones. Keep a list of great books your friends or family recommend, and solicit suggestions from people whose opinions you value.
Further, think big and wide when it comes to books. For example, I’m a nonfiction or memoir girl at heart, and I have trouble remembering how freeing novels can be. Do you equate “reading books” with “reading boring business books”? If so, push yourself to go beyond the boundaries of your normal life. To feel better about your reading voyeurism, hit garage sales or mine Amazon.com for $.99 books. It’ll encourage you to try new things without regret.
The same works for other goals as well. If you’re trying to reach a goal, surrounding yourself with information, resources, or a relevant community in your daily life will increase your ability to hit it.
KEEP GOALS RELEVANT
One mistaken notion about goal setting is that you should always be incrementally increasing your goals. This “more is better” mindset is a trap I’ve fallen into many times before. In the past, I believed that if I hit my goal last year I should beat it this year. The reality, though, is that always increasing your goals can be just plain stupid, and can run in direct contrast to one of the keys in the SMART goal-setting framework: relevancy.
Smart goals must always be relevant to who you are in a given season of life. In my case, when faced with setting my annual goals for 2014, I had to come up against a very relevant reality of my upcoming 2014.
That reality? I was having a baby. And I was not the first person to have been told that babies take time, energy, and effort to keep in pristine, working order. As such, it made sense for me to think of this blaringly relevant life event when considering my list of potential goals. When I thought about where I could cut back, my goal to read two hundred books stood out as a bad idea. Although reading serves as my outlet, peacemaker, and primary hobby, it does take time to reach that goal, and time was at a premium for me that year.
As such, I reduced my 2014 reading goal to 150 books. And even though that’s still a truckload of books, in some tiny way it did feel like I was throwing in the towel. After all, in my heart I really did feel like I could hit two hundred if I just tried. But is it smart goal setting to think of the relevancy of a goal in your particular season of life? Absolutely. The year 2014 just wasn’t the one to stretch myself to read more. Remember to keep your goals relevant at all costs.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU PICKED THE RIGHT GOALS?
One year, one of my health goals was about making sure I drank enough water each day. It sounds simple, and it is. Or that’s what I thought. As soon as I wrote “drink the right amount of water” on my goals list, however, I stepped into a quagmire.
It turns out that there is a ton of conflicting advice online about how
much water you should drink each day. Do you really need to drink half your weight in water? Or is it more like eight 8-oz glasses of water (which may be more or less than that, depending on your weight)? Does it really have to be all water? Or does tea count? Can homemade fruit juice or smoothies even be considered part of that number?
Twenty minutes of me, online, trying to figure out how much water I needed to drink, and I wanted to chuck the whole goal out the window.
This is ridiculous, I thought. Who cares? I wailed. (Me, apparently. Because who else spends twenty minutes cross-checking strangers’ random responses to Yahoo Answer queries from 2009 as a means to determine anything about their health?)
Here’s the thing: I never figured out the right answer. Today, I don’t pretend to know the “right” answer or even if there is one. Instead, I just plowed ahead and picked a number. The goal I set (64 ounces a day) might be right. It might be wrong. But it’s just what I chose. (And it happens to be exceedingly easy to remember, given that it makes up exactly two full bottles of the brand that I use.)
Sometimes, we’re not always sure about the goals we set at the beginning of the year. Are they “right”? Are they wrong? Should they be different? If they aren’t going to hurt you (drinking water shouldn’t hurt me, I hear), then just try them. If they don’t work, you can always change course.
To stick to your goals, it’s important to remember them—and not just a few times a year. We all need a regular reminder of what we’re setting our sights on in order to get where we want to go.
Different people do this in different ways. One of the downsides of being married to a brilliant architect is that he has high standards about how things look in the lovely home he designed and built for us. As such, I have still not won the battle for a treadmill desk (he cannot think of something more aesthetically unappealing). Additionally, hanging a huge sign in my office with my chicken-scratched goals on it is not in his vision of aesthetic bliss. And that’s okay with me. There are things on that list I’m not sure I want every houseguest to examine.
And for good reason.
One of my most cringe-worthy life memories relates to seeing someone else’s goal list, in fact.
I was twenty and my friend Lara and I had gone to London to visit our friend Amalia. As I remember it, we experienced some classic travel nightmare in getting to England from Italy, where we were studying for six months. We missed a connection, a lot of running and sweat were involved, and we arrived exhausted and near delirious. Amalia’s roommates were out of town that weekend, and they kindly let me and Lara sleep in their beds. When I tucked into the tiny twin in the turreted corner lent to me, I saw a list tacked up above my head. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. And then I realized it was a list of goals.
I’ve tried to block out most of what happened next.
When I realized what I was seeing, I giggled. And then I started laughing. Hard. And then I told Lara to come over and she laughed. Hard. Pretty soon we were rolling on the floor making fun of the list. I don’t even know what we laughed at, exactly. Whether it was the idea of the thing—tacking your goals on a wall! Ha! Or a specific goal in and of itself. Get good grades! Hysterical! Whatever it was, Amalia stopped us in our tracks, calling us out on our behavior. We immediately woke up to reality, apologized, and went to bed, embarrassed.
Even though I couldn’t for the life of me tell you the name of the girl’s bed I slept in that weekend, I’ve thought about this incident dozens of times in the years since. And although I’m sure no one who enters my house is one-tenth as mean as I was that night in London long ago, I’m still gun-shy about hanging my list up on a wall. Luckily, this works well with my husband.
My goals are in the front of my journal. Where I look at them daily. Find your place, and display them, proudly.
Now that you’ve got a word for your year, and some goals to work toward, it’s time to live them.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
—Annie Dillard
We’ve talked about how to Decide on the key goals in your life, and now it’s time to Organize your days to win.
Organizing your life, however, is not about taking a trip to the Container Store. Don’t get me wrong; I love me a fancy fabric-covered box that promises to solve all my problems. However, I also know how ineffective it is in terms of long-term organization. To truly create an organized life and reach the goals you’ve set for yourself, the key is doing less. (The same holds for closets, it turns out. Less stuff is always the path to true organization.)
The Do Less Method offers that organizing well is a matter of four steps, and we’ll go through these, point by point. The “O” (Organize) is divided into four parts. Each part makes up the word LESS.
A massage therapist I know has spent her life around human bodies—strong ones, weak ones, and all the variations in between. She believes that the key to moving well is to listen to your body’s desire to do less. Whether you’re sitting in a chair or standing up tall, she says, you need to ask yourself how you can do less. Our bodies know that sitting on our sit bones, and not slouching, is better. Our bodies know that lifting something heavy works better when we squat and lift with all our power.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, this idea really hit home. For nine months, it felt like I wasn’t doing much of anything. But really, while I sat in doctors’ offices and lay around watching Agatha Christie movies—doing a whole lot of nothing, it felt like—the biggest thing I’d ever done was growing behind the scenes. More than anything, this was a reminder to me that we often don’t realize when something truly powerful is taking place. Did that trip with a friend lay the groundwork for a new screenplay? Did the week off recharge your batteries to let you work well all season? In contrast, did your entire workday get sucked into a series of meetings that led to nothing? Did the volley of emails you sent back and forth this morning only add confusion—not clarity—to a situation at work? In everything we do, we need to think about when we are really making an impact, and always seek out the way to do less to do more.
When it comes to productivity, a key way to do this is to limit the things we do. The 80/20 Principle says that we accomplish 80 percent of our work in 20 percent of our time. Conversely, we waste 80 percent of our time spinning our wheels to get a measly 20 percent of our results. This means that to truly be productive we need to try and only do that 20 percent of things we are really good at that bring us great results, and eliminate the other 20 percent from our plate completely. Ultimately, this is the key to freeing up immense amounts of time and getting rid of those sixty-, fifty-, or even forty-hour workweeks.
If you can choose your hours or have control over how many hours you work, this concept is particularly revolutionary. Working in an office environment with fixed hours makes this more challenging, but there still are key ways to work in these lessons to make a powerful difference in your productivity and your life.
LEARN WHAT ONLY YOU CAN DO: DETERMINE YOUR “BEST 20%”
The first step is to identify those Best 20% activities.
Entrepreneur Chris Ducker is a great mind in the space of hiring outside help, and I’ve learned from him in developing my strategy to identify your Best 20% activities. This exercise will help you see where you should spend your time, where you should find resources or better delegate, and where you should work hard to simply stop doing a certain activity.
To get going, take out two pieces of paper. Label one BIG WINS and the other ACTIVITIES.
On the first sheet of paper, write down some of your biggest wins in the past few years in your personal and professional life. This should be a list of one-off individual things like, “The deal I closed with that big firm,” “Appearing on my local radio station,” “Taking a family trip to Mexico,” and ongoing things like, “Learning from my mentor,” “Taking piano classes,” or “Spending regular time with my children.”
On the secon
d sheet of paper, ACTIVITIES, think about all the activities you take part in on a regular basis—no matter if they led to those big wins or not. Your list will include all manner of things: sleeping, eating, emailing, traveling, taking meetings, giving presentations, going to church, cleaning the house, spending time with kids, going to family events, commuting, attending Bible study, volunteering, etc.
Now, looking at the second sheet of paper, you need to identify which of three categories the things on the second sheet of paper fall into. Here are the three categories:
1. Things Only I Can Do: try putting stars around the “things only I can do” category, as these are the most important.
2. Things Someone Else Can Do
3. Things I Should Stop Doing
So, for example, “spending time with kids” does not fall under “Things Someone Else Can Do,” as it is not something you can hire someone else to help you with, or something you can delegate to someone on your team. In contrast, cleaning the house is a great candidate for “Things Someone Else Can Do.”
There might be some areas where one thing falls into two categories. For example, “traveling for work,” although it is something only you can do, is not necessarily something you always need to do, or need to do as much as you do. Was that out-of-town meeting really necessary or did you just think you “should” be there in person? Could you have cut it out? Sometimes we think that all types of a certain activity are necessary, when we could pick and choose better and some instances might fall under “Things You Should Stop Doing.”
Design Your Day Page 3